Unwelcome Guests, byDavid C. Kopaska-Merkel, Weird House, 2024. 117 pp. ISBN: 978-1-957121-76-5, www.weirdhousepress.com, softcover $14.95.
Review by Sandra J. Lindow
Unwelcome Guests by Grandmaster David Kopaska-Merkelis his 28th poetry collection. His previous book, Some Disassembly Required, won SFPA’s 2023 Elgin Award for full-length poetry collection.
In Kopaska -Merkel’s world view, unwelcome guests are entities who arrive unexpectedly and unpleasantly. The cover illustration by Skinny Gaviar depicts a headless man in a lime-green leisure suit and red running shoes, apparently undead. The 111 poems in this collection continue his exploration of the fantastically weird and humorously horrific. The book is divided into two sections: “Opening Night in Carcosa,” explores themes of fantastic horror while “Martian Body Bag” reflects on classic science fiction. Both sections include haiku.
“Opening Night in Carcosa” begins with poems based on Cthulhu mythology. Carcosa is Lovecraft’s fictional city where magical monsters are real, tentacles are pervasive, and a dog named Fluffy seems to handle extradimensional, inter-poem travel with aplomb. “Opening Night” opens readers to these dark passions, via a proscenium stage with access to the underworld: “On stage, / meaningful glances draw blood, / scenery subtly moves closer / to the action, / lines and actors drop like flies” (4).
“Carly’s Cleaning Service” indicates that cleaning a Miskatonic professor’s house isn’t as safe as it might seem: “the jaws of an atavistic horror, / instantly, and briefly, recognized” (5). Kopaska-Merkel’s approach to horror is spare, providing just enough to give his readers a bit of a shiver or in case or this haiku, a smile: “sold out / Flat Earth Society cruise /point of no return” (8). One wonders if he were inspired by Maga hat Flat Earthers interviewed on ABC during the previous election season.
In horror, human passions tend toward the excessive and violent, but in Unwelcome Guests, love endures. Consider this one-liner “murder-suicide conjugal graveyard visits” (34). “Loose” describes an ex-wife killed “in a threshing machine accident” who “had a way of turning up.” “Made from broken parts, / She left a trail of herself wherever she went; / Like a starfish, she regrew” (18). “Face” describes a near date-rape and an unexpected protector.
Other poems feature various other mythologies--vampires, werewolves, zombies, and an undocumented Baba Yaga, most often within an everyday context but upscale restaurants can be truly frightful. In “Coffee Break,” “Death checks her scythe at the door, / sweeps past the maitre’d, / I’m meeting someone” (29). Even those with the most power over the lives of others are helpless in the face of their own mortality. “Bad Boy” is a mashup of Pinocchio and “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” while “In the Land of Giants” combines Gulliver’s Travels, Jack and the Beanstalk, and Alice in Wonderland.
Part two: “Martian Body Bag” plays fast and loose with common science fictional tropes, sometimes as in June Lockhart’s Recurring Nightmare” mixing actors’ real lives with the roles they played in classic sf movies and TV (as if they themselves were not sure of the difference).
Many of these poems are cautionary tales that explore the dangers of scientific advancement via Murphy’s Law. “The Problem with Ellen,” for instance, describes what happens when a “droid” office worker has an over-heated battery:
Smoke was coming out of its ear,”
She whispered hoarsely, later,
“Just pouring out.”
At first Ellen didn’t seem to notice,
Just
kept typing (64).
A number of them excel as one-breath, horrific with a twist. Consider the effective use of cognitive dissonance in this haiku: “waiting / at the transmat station / more of Dad arrives” (66). The unexpected left turn makes it funny.
Several poems explore who or what is food. “Keeping the Traditions” is perhaps the most unexpected. It begins: “the cheese ship’s rind / held through touchdown / on New Wisconsin / the wheel would never fly again—” (73). Other poems play with relativity and time travel. “Dog Plus” is a humorous look at animal uplift: “I remember when Fido did our taxes …” (85).
Perhaps the most poignant of these poems address how life ends. “The Length of a Candle” describes the plight of a sentient nearly immortal spaceship and concludes: “Time passes, microwave background cools, / home star must be cinder or close by now/ he will return, make report / if anyone is there to receive it, / ask to be turned off” (98). Finally, a love poem entitled simply “Recording,” begins” “Living in a plain white-paper land; / everything used to crawl with life,” and goes on to describe how sensory memories of a lover’s skin become “a dream painted on alley walls,” “tomes in a library, / books and books, / scrimshaw without bone” and concludes “and my body, if I could still feel it, would be something, just like this” (107).
Because it is anchored in everyday experience, Unwelcome Guests offers fantastic horror in a way that can be intimately experienced while remaining at a safe distance. Kopaska-Merkel is a master at manipulating readers’ emotions and expectations. His sympathy for the monstrous never devolves into heavy handed disgust. Highly recommended.
Sandra Lindow has served as Vice President and Acting President of SFPA. Her poetry has been seen in various markets including Asimov’s, Star*Line, Dreams and Nightmares, Dwarf Stars, and the Rhysling Anthologies. Her spec related editing includes Dwarf Stars, Eye to the Telescope, and most recently the Rhysling winners anthology, Alchemy of Stars II. She lives on a hilltop in Menomonie, Wisconsin where she waits out the pandemic and attempts various strategies to keep varmints from eating her vegetables and perennials.
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